An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

New Census data for 2008, the first full year of this recession, show just how bad our national economic stumble has been and add new urgency to policymakers' efforts to protect the fragile recovery.

Archeologists believe our ancestors began wearing clothes 70,000 years ago, perhaps even earlier. And now there's proof that somewhere around 26,000 to 32,000 years ago they had developed a sense of style.

President Obama's eloquent address to a joint session of Congress was one he should have made a lot sooner, before the health-care debate started to spiral out of control.

He was too aloof and hands off at the outset and distressingly slow in answering attacks and distortions, a mistake he vowed not to repeat. "Death panels," he said, are "a lie, plain and simple."

A blue-ribbon panel of experts commissioned by the Obama administration has concluded that the nation will likely have to scale back its lofty plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and then press on to Mars.

The principle obstacle is money -- $3 billion a year more than the $18 billion NASA already gets. And even then we would not reach the moon any earlier than 2025.

Here's another reason not to let the Taliban take over Afghanistan or any other country for that matter.

In a spectacularly misguided effort at bringing peace to the Swat Valley Pakistan's central government let the Taliban take over and install their own harsh and extreme version of Islamic rule, causing 2 million people to flee what had once been a prosperous resort area.

Washington has been engaged in a slow, sometimes grudging effort to make it easier for people to visit the United States. We want visitors.

One of the many irritants of post-9/11 air travel is the search of carry-on bags for containers -- shampoo, shaving cream, tooth paste -- above a certain size and their disposal in bins kept at security checkpoints for that purpose.

The goal of last month's Afghan elections, at least from the U.S. point of view, was to fairly elect a leader and have the Afghan people see that leader as their legitimate national representative.

President Obama has pledged that his administration will be "the most open and transparent administration in history." That remains to be seen but he took another significant step in that direction by agreeing to start releasing the names of visitors to the White House and incidentally settling four freedom-of-information lawsuits in the process.

And now a message from Karl Marx: Stay in school. Work hard. Set goals. Take responsibility.

Actually, those are the themes of President Obama's back-to-school speech Tuesday, the one that is being offered to all of the nation's schools and has set off near-hysteria among some of the president's more hardcore critics.